Dining / Cooking

Lemonade gives license to creativity

By Chris Kridler | Wednesday, August 20, 2008 | () comments

Homemade lemonade is an iconic summer drink, but some folks don’t like its squeeze on their time.

Fred Thompson, whose many cookbooks include “Lemonade: 50 Cool Recipes for Classic, Flavored and Hard Lemonades and Sparklers” (The Harvard Common Press, 2002, $12.95), says it’s worth the effort, though.

“It’ll out-taste anything on the market,” he adds.

Refrigerated lemonades that you buy in the grocery store have come a long way in the past few years, he says, but you don’t get the oils from the rind. “To me, that’s just sort of critical,” Thompson says in an interview from Raleigh, N.C.

The rind helps the flavor intensify, he adds. “It’s not a pucker intensification. It’s a very pleasant intensification.”

Kathy Miller of West Melbourne, Fla., uses rinds when she makes lemonade following the recipe her sister, Nancy Bailey, got in 1959 from a farmer’s wife in Illinois.

“She makes it and it’s nothing fancy,” Miller says. “She always makes it in a plastic gallon jug.” Even if it’s not fancy, “It is awesome,” she adds.

But Miller can’t figure out why her lemonade is never as good as her sister’s.

“I have followed that (recipe) to the stupid letter and I don’t know what it is,” she says.

Her experience illustrates the fact that lemonade is more of an art than a science and that the words “to taste” in a recipe should be taken seriously. Taste it when you make it, and add sugar or lemon if your brew isn’t quite perfect.

There’s no use in being a purist when it comes to lemonade, especially when there are so many possibilities. Thompson likens himself to a “mad scientist” when coming up with recipes. (Look for more of his cookbooks in 2009, “Grilling with Gas” and “Bourbon.”)

“Probably the most esoteric (recipe) when the book came out was the Italian lemonade, the Tuscan lemonade, that’s herb-infused,” he says.

Other fruits get along well with lemons. Grind the fruit up with a little sugar in a food processor and mix it with your lemonade to make different brews, he suggests.

“They’re very impressive, and you can do it with about any fruit.”

Will the bottled lemon juice work as well?

Thompson says he used to sell a popular lemon juice in another career, “and I think it’s a disgusting product.” That said, people might have better luck with a product such as Nellie & Joe’s Famous Key West Lime Juice.

“You can almost treat it like a lemonade and come up with a pretty successful outcome,” he says.

To give store-bought lemonade a fresh twist, buy a half-gallon of refrigerated lemonade and a couple of lemons. Ream them, he says, and add those and a couple of limes to the lemonade.

“Let all that kind of get happy together for like an hour,” he adds.

It’s faster and better than using bottled lemon juice. You might want to add a little superfine sugar to complete the taste.

But when making lemonade from scratch, regular sugar helps in the mixing, he says.

“It’s kind of like a natural sandpaper, and it’s helping you get the oils out of the rind.”

Any lemons will work, and he suggests buying them in winter, when they’re cheaper, and squeezing and freezing the juice. In summer, he’ll take the frozen juice and add the juice and rinds of a couple of fresh lemons to reinforce the flavor.

Thompson’s many books include another on a favorite summer drink, “Iced Tea: 50 Recipes for Refreshing Tisanes, Infusions, Coolers and Spiked Teas.” (The Harvard Common Press, 2002, $12.95)

Writing “Lemonade,” he says, “seemed like a natural progression from ‘Iced Tea,’ and it just evoked a lot of childhood memories and those days that you would set up the card table and have your own little lemonade stand and sweat bullets while you were trying to make 10 cents a glass.”

The Gannett News Service contributed to this article.

Chris Kridler can be contacted at (321) 242-3633 or ckridler@floridatoday.com.